Who Is Your Neighbor? What Do You Owe Them?

I was thinking this morning about an issue that came up at the last meeting of the police jury, the county governing board in my part of the world. There was an attempt to get the police jury to sign off in some way on approval of Section 8 housing in a certain part of the parish.

To be clear, I am not certain what, precisely, was requested — that is, whether it was approval of the project itself, or simply a request for an endorsement by the jury. I’m not making a statement about this particular situation, only using it as a springboard to raise a philosophical and moral issue for discussion. I’m not sure what I think about it, and want to put the question to the room.

Over the past 20 years or so, a certain number of people — often people of means — have left the city of Baton Rouge to come live here in the Feliciana hills, in large part to escape the rising crime and collapsing public school system in East Baton Rouge Parish. West Feliciana, where I live, is largely rural, and has significant poverty, especially concentrated among the black community, many of whom live in radically substandard housing.

West Feliciana also has a housing shortage for everyone — this, in part because of market forces. There are more people wanting to buy land here than there is land for sale. Consequently, the cost of acreage is high, meaning that many people cannot afford to move here. It also means that many people, white and black alike, who were born and raised in this place cannot afford to live here. This is how the market is working. You cannot force landowners to sell their land — and much of the land here is held by a relatively small number of landowners.

Anyway, the thing that scares the heck out of white people is that Baton Rouge crime will find a foothold here in our parish. What they mean is that they don’t want poor black people from north Baton Rouge, with all their social pathologies, settling here. About the Section 8 thing, one white police juror said publicly that he is on board with helping poor people from our parish get housing, but he’s concerned that putting new Section 8 housing in the parish would attract people from outside the parish. He didn’t put it this way, but what he means is: poor black people from East Baton Rouge. It is completely understandable that folks wouldn’t want to import people from that socioeconomic class into our peaceful part of the world.

It is a reasonable concern, though not, I would contend, an excuse for not doing something for the poor people, white and black, who live in this parish. (Again, I’m not taking sides on this particular issue, only using a real world example to spark discussion). Moreover, what do we say to the poor black family in East Baton Rouge who wants the same thing well-off white people in EBR do — to live and raise their kids in a place that’s safe, and to attend a good public school — but who don’t have the means to move up here?

Alternatively, what do you say to the poor black people of this parish who want and need decent housing, but who may feel that they have enough to deal with these days without having their kids exposed to the kinds of pathologies that are tearing up the black community in the inner city?

The police juror I mention pointed out that we are already a cash-strapped parish in a cash-strapped state, and that importing people from outside the parish who have no means of support absent welfare payments is a bad idea. That seems to me to be quite reasonable as well. The well-off who move here from the city have means of self-support, and pay taxes. But there are poor people on welfare who live in this parish, and who have all their lives, who are living in shacks, and who need housing. As a moral question, how do you tell those people — your neighbors — that they are condemned to live in crappy houses despite government money being there to help them live better, because you’re afraid that will open the door to bad people from the city moving in?

What is one’s primary duty? To one’s community, or to the poor? I would say that the concrete reality of one’s community is more important than the abstraction that is the Poor. Your most important duty is to look after the well-being of your neighbors. But what about the poor in one’s own community? They are your neighbors in a way that people who live outside the parish, rich or poor, are not. That is also at issue in this example. I doubt that there’s a mechanism for ensuring that Section 8 housing only goes to people who are residents in the parish.

What would you do if you were on the police jury? How would you justify your vote?

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68 Responses to Who Is Your Neighbor? What Do You Owe Them?

murders, drug dealing, and gun violence are concentrated in the poor black community, which has a staggeringly high out-of-wedlock birth rate

Murders, drug dealing and gun violence, and high out of wedlock birth rate, are legitimate issues, no matter what the demographics of “those people” who are enmeshed in the same. The fact that the people mentioned happen to be black doesn’t negate the concern. (See Grisham’s A Time To Kill with its introductory mention of both white and black juke joints).

The folks who suffer the most from living in a ghetto are the law-abiding poor that have no choice but to live there. The folks who live in the ghettos and actually are the causes of the problems–the gang-bangers and the like–are generally more content to stay.

Yes to the first, no to the second. Gang-bangers need someone to prey on. And people do move both into and out of that set of pathologies. I recall a man in South Carolina who grew up in New York, who pointed out that working parents move way out into Pennsylvania, because they want a better life. “But they take their kids with them.” And soon, gang graffiti appears on the fences.

And here is where race intrudes as an issue. When the law-abiding black folks move into an area, by a logic of racial solidarity the gang-bangers follow. Harlem became black when a lot of middle class professionals who had saved up their money and were red-lined from buying homes made an offer to developers who couldn’t sell their brand new brownstones, during a depression. But others followed.

This particular pathology is entirely the creation of white supremacy. When law abiding middle class folks, much less law abiding poor folks, are treated by law and culture as gang-bangers and the like, gang-bangers acquire a certain cover. And they move with their cover.

A friend of mine, impeccably African American, who owns some rental property, has stopped listing it with Section 8, because the people who show up with vouchers tend to do massive damage to the property. How to help those who need it, without continuing to give Section 8 a bad name by listing people who do massive damage, is an interesting question. Possibly ratings from past landlords could be a disqualification?

But I note that out in Charles Cosimano’s beautiful suburban realm, there are “projects” in immaculate condition, that are greatly admired by school bus drivers who commute from inner-city Milwaukee. One mentioned to me that she had told a friend “These white folks really know how to take care of this property.” Her friend replied, “No, those are black folks. This is the hood.” So its not, in the end, a racial thing.

how could the local low-income families get preference for local Section 8 housing?

As William Dalton points out, courts have frowned on residency requirements. It may well be a good idea to open that door again to some extent. Putting restrictions on aid is not the same thing as putting restrictions on the freedom of an individual to act on their own dime. There are precedents that might be useful.

But in the meantime, it might work to quietly announce in the local area the creation of a new Section 8 waiting list. There is no legal duty to advertise widely. Once the waiting list is in place, people from removed regions of heightened pathology might find themselves way down the list. On the other hand, local people who didn’t get the word might find themselves in line behind people from Baton Rouge who did find out and signed up.

I think that a big problem with programs like Section 8 housing is that it is only a topical treatment for the much deeper issue of poverty.

Oh yes. To the extent that people who are on Section 8 are working, the taxpayers are being asked to subsidize the employers who pay such low wages. It would be better to raise the minimum wage and scale back subsidies for housing, food, medical care, etc.

…this is the difference between many (most) (nearly all) conservative Christians and liberal Christians in the American of 2013: I see our Christian duty as to help the poor without destroying ourselves.

I never said we shouldn’t help the poor. I just said that we don’t need to bring people into rich neighborhoods to help them. We can support programs that help them in the neighborhoods they already live in.

Glaivester, whose position is the mainstream conservative Christian position, sees poor, black people as the enemy.

I think that the ways Thomas Andrews proposes to help them will destroy the communities that are trying to help them.

You ask why I point out the distinction between our two warring factions of the American Christian faith. There you have it, in black and white. It couldn’t be clearer.
Or, sadder.

This is a dishonest interpretation of my point. Thomas Andrews completely ignores my statement that we should be helping the poor – in their own neighborhoods. If he disagrees with this, he should explain why he does not think it is possible (or at least preferable) to help them in their own neighborhoods, rather than dishonestly imply that I don’t think we should help them at all.

My interpretation of the difference between us is that Thomas Andrews sees our Christian duty as being to allow our communities and neighborhood to be destroyed in order to help the poor, whereas I want to find ways to help them that do not involve destroying our communities.

As someone who lives a modern, bourgeois life in many ways, and who agrees with Rod about its value (or the value of at least some kinds of bourgeois life), I’ve been very challenged by Charles Featherstone’s excellent comment – because I think he’s on to something.

We try to rationalize away Jesus’ words. Surely he didn’t really mean “if you have two coats, give away” or “love your neighbour as yourself” literally, did he?

What scares me is the very strong possibility that he meant exactly that (as well as a whole load of other things – Jesus spoke on many levels at once). If that’s the case then almost all of us are failing catastrophically to live a truly Christian life. And that’s worth thinking about when we make any decision.

Re: whereas I want to find ways to help them that do not involve destroying our communities.

As long as these folks are American citizens, they have the legal right to live wherever they like. You don’t actually have the legal right to keep them out of your community. And honestly, how come I never see conservatives complaining about Hasidic Jews or East Asians taking over communities? There cultures are at least as alien to American Christians as poor black people from Baton Rouge are.

To put my own cards on the table, I was raised in a super-liberal, upper-middle class, largely Jewish suburb of Boston. When I was a kid, the state located a Section 8 housing building near our house, and some of the kids went to my elementary school. Looking back on it now, there was very perceptible unease directed towards these poor families from Boston and their kids, and the curious thing was how the unease and the casual derogatory comments was coming from super-liberal people who would be very shocked and hurt by the implication that they were racist. These people and their kids were *not* made to feel welcome, and that’s a horrible thing. And looking back on my own childhood in a privileged Boston suburb, I feel guilty that I wasn’t more aware of the reality of race and class prejudice, and didn’t make more of an effort to socialize with those kids and make them feel at home.

Residential segregation is a big, big problem in our society, and we need to do what we can to overcome it.

Re: What scares me is the very strong possibility that he meant exactly that (as well as a whole load of other things – Jesus spoke on many levels at once).

Yes. Jesus didn’t mean to make life easy for us (and yes, I’m as guilty as anyone else here). He said, in fact:

“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

Re: If that’s the case then almost all of us are failing catastrophically to live a truly Christian life. And that’s worth thinking about when we make any decision.

Re: “It would be better to raise the minimum wage and scale back subsidies for housing, food, medical care, etc.”

Yes, lot’s of unemployment is the answer!

OK raise the minimum wage and create lots and lots of public day-labor jobs for the long-term unemployed– meaning any non-elderly, able-bodied adult who is not a caregiver for a very young child or a disabled person. You work you get paid– and there’s no excuse for unemployment.

As long as these folks are American citizens, they have the legal right to live wherever they like. You don’t actually have the legal right to keep them out of your community.

Residential segregation is a big, big problem in our society, and we need to do what we can to overcome it.

Both true statements, but they need to be worked with carefully, with some forethought. I would say that making an effort to welcome the newcomers is VERY important. If everyone is making casual derogatory comments, cringing, avoiding “them,” then “they” pick that up very fast, and “they” do NOT absorb the values of the community, they come to see those values, and those pushing them, as the enemy.

But, its also true that not everyone is a good sociable neighbor. People who have well maintained houses and nice gardens don’t want the neighborhood to be dominated by people who let their houses run down and park cars on the lawn, no matter what color either one might be. Its a little harder to sort out of all of one are one color and all of another are another color. In this sense, the cultural merger of poor white trash and black thugs is a plus, because the hard working people with aspirations of both colors can get on with their lives, at some discreet distance, without being racist about it.

The more mixed we are racially, the more we can sort ourselves out on more objective criteria, while leaving the door open to people who want to get up and out.

(Callahan… please… you’re not trying to run that tired old canard that increasing the minimum wage throws people out of work… are you? There is zero evidence that this happens… its just the convenient boogie-man tossed up by plutocrats who don’t really want to pay their employees adequately, and would rather have taxpayers support them with food stamps and Medicare. There is only one reason an enterprise hires an employee: they NEED that employee’s labor in order to produce a good or service they can sell. If there’s a market for the good or service, they will hire. It there isn’t, they won’t. Minimum wage has never come close to absorbing ALL the surplus value generated by anyone’s labor.)

As long as these folks are American citizens, they have the legal right to live wherever they like. You don’t actually have the legal right to keep them out of your community

We are talking about poor people who need subsidized housing here, not about racial minorities (not that there is not an overlap). So they can’t live wherever they like unless people decide to subsidize their living there. So in short, your statement has nothing to do with what I am discussing.

And honestly, how come I never see conservatives complaining about Hasidic Jews or East Asians taking over communities?

Middle class East Asians and Hasidic Jews tend to be less numerous than lower class people (including both poor whites as well as poor Latinos and blacks), so the issue doesn’t arise as often. Moreover, East Asians and Hasidic Jews are not as associated with violent crime and similar pathologies, so it is easier to deal with their presence even if it is alien.

This is pretty difficult, Rod. I don’t know enough about zoning laws to say anything remotely helpful about solutions. My only area of small expertise is in the balancing of human need within and without a family or community .

My initial reaction to this is based in my beliefs about families being divinely appointed. We have sacred duties to our families, to provide for physical and spiritual needs. No other success will compensate for failure in the home. Helping others is noble, but not if it is to the detriment of my familial obligations.

And since I believe in an active, caring God, I believe that where we live is no accident. Of all the times and places to live in, there is a certain group of people currently residing in your parish. That doesn’t mean nothing. We are supposed to be willing to entertain the stranger, but showing preference to our community doesn’t make us monsters. Otherwise, Thomas Andrews, your financial generosity to your children and grandchildren and to yourself for overseas travel would be just as questionable as Rod’s devotion to his town’s best interests.

We’re supposed to be wise stewards of the things God has given. That means we give, generously, but also wisely. Teaching a man how to fish and helping him acquire a spare fishing pole is better than giving him a fish and your only fishing pole. It’s possible to help the poor where they are, and is a kinder option in many ways, if only because if we exhaust our own resources then we stop being a source of relief for the poor. If West Feliciana isn’t a wise steward of its stability then it will only serve to multiply the unhappy poverty that its people are seeking to diminish.

Even Jesus said that giving free food is nice, but wasn’t the most important or powerful thing on offer.

My church has welfare programs where beneficiaries are expected to donate a portion of their time and energy, if they can. And there are educational programs geared towards helping people better their lives within their families and communities, instead of facilitating emigration from struggling areas.

Helping the poor and struggling isn’t done solely through Section 8. To criticize the Christianity of those who aren’t sure Section 8 is the best idea sounds like a pretty black/white reaction to me.

Re: There is only one reason an enterprise hires an employee: they NEED that employee’s labor in order to produce a good or service they can sell. If there’s a market for the good or service, they will hire. It there isn’t, they won’t. Minimum wage has never come close to absorbing ALL the surplus value generated by anyone’s labor.)

There are more technical reasons that the minimum wage (at current levels) doesn’t suppress employment, which I don’t remember now, I think they have to do with monopsony and marginal costs, or something. But you’re basically right.

Re: I would say that making an effort to welcome the newcomers is VERY important. If everyone is making casual derogatory comments, cringing, avoiding “them,” then “they” pick that up very fast, and “they” do NOT absorb the values of the community, they come to see those values, and those pushing them, as the enemy.

Yes, and I know now that that’s exactly the way that my hometown *didn’t* welcome the folks in the Section 8 apartments. There were no crosses burned on lawns or racist insults or anything, nothing so crude as that. The distaste for the poor Black families from Boston was much more subtle than that. It’s been a while now (I left that school when I was twelve, so exactly twenty years) but as I recall, there was just whispered talk about how those folks were so *different* from us, and as you say, a lot of cringing and avoidance. This was a city, of course, where everyone was staunchly culturally liberal, committed to ‘tolerance’, ‘diversity’, ‘multiculturalism’, etc.. We sang songs about Martin Luther King, Jr. in music class, and had assemblies dedicated to tolerance and diversity. And yet, when a housing development was built with one third of the units devoted to low-income families, those folks were *not* made to feel welcome. (The Black kids from Boston who came to our school through the busing program were maybe marginally more accepted, but not really).

Welcoming someone to your community can’t be a passive thing either: it needs to be an active reaching out, and a breaking out of your comfort zone. I wasn’t particularly impressed by how well my hometown managed to do that.

Your have no specific obligation to help any individual poor person w/ money or food unless they are in a dire (read: starving, other horrible situations) situation because your first obligation is to you and yours per the old moral theology manuals. You do have an obligation to give a certain percentage of your time/treasure/talent to charitable uses depending upon your state in life.

Thus, your first obligation is to you and yours. Folks who are destroying themselves in the ghetto you have an obligation to as well, but it is not nearly as pressing or particular.

It is always fascinating to me the way one of the basic, and unappreciated, issues in play between 1830-1861 continues to raise its head; what to do with identifiable populations that will always, presumably, create more in social costs versus income production comparable to other populations and thus be viewed, whether openly or privately, as a collective drag on society? This was the matter with which the American Colonization Society occupied itself in an effort to end slavery without having the burden (as they perceived it) of supporting in some fashion the former slave population indefinitely. It is also the matter that concerned American eugenicists in the early 20th century and of course it was a matter of concern to Southern segregationists. All of these folks, of course, we are told were evil people though now the same struggle is more localized and takes the form of your current dilemma. In today’s world we’ve decided to let the rich escape this population without condemnation and we tell ourselves that folks like this fellow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLdtX7L-GCk are evil for wanting the same protective, mostly racial, enclaves that the rich have created for themselves.

If there is no legitimate work, or if legitimate work offers low wages, people will turn to crime. Living in blight fosters an attitude of not caring about things. So your efforts need to be: working on improving education (with a slant towards the technical and running businesses), simplifying regulations for small buisnesses as much as possible, improving the local infrastructure (parks, schools, and open spaces), and gradually raising the minimum wage. The obligation should not be to give away free housing and abandoning old neighborhoods. The obligation is to try and make improvements for better function and sustainability.

Our neighbors are those in need. And any moral obligations to love your neighbors are personal, not to be forced upon others. Government is not the bedrock of charity.

My suggestion, and it is my way of acting as well, is to provide what I can to those who are already seeking something ontheir own and working to the best of their abilities to provide it for themselves.

This requires a certain degree of knowledge of the people, their lifestyles and morals and abilities, in the pool of those who have come into one’s circle of awareness. This is not devisive, cumbersome or unusual. Churches have been instructed for millenia to care for their own in need. And the good Samaritan was not told to go out and search the highways and by-ways for those in need.

Neither do religions as such have to be the bodies that enjoy such a calling, but any group of caring, like-minded people, progressive, coinservative, muslim, hindu or atheist.

My advice? Select the land, build the houses, interview the poor, grant (even rent-free) residence of the houses to them. Have the land-owners and those who provide the houses maintain legal ownership. Set rules for those whom you allow residence to follow, and enforce them.

Make a tax-free fund to manage the money if you want. Do it as big or as small, or as fast or as slow as you want. But keep the government out of it, and keep its hand out of the pockets of those who don’t want to participate.

Let me add my personal experience with Section-8. I bought a rowhouse in Baltimore (where I was born) in 1997 or so. I rehabbed it and sold it in 2004 or so.

During that time, watching the controlled demolition of inner-city low-income housing projects was exiting but I never gave a thought to where those families were going. I just assumed newer better ones. In fact, the acculturated Section-8 families were moving into residential Section-8 houses in and around my neighborhood (again, older rowhouses like mine).

In those few years, crime sky-rocketed, including littering, break-ins, drugs, no-go streets and murders. The night before settlement on selling my house, I was awakened by police lights and angry crowds. A person had been shot in the park across the street after a high school football game. Within a few weeks friends sent me reports that other local residents were shot in the neighboring blocks in braod daylight and, as I recall, car-jackings had come to my old neighborhood — what had until recently been a sleepy, older, pre-gentrification section of town.

I was glad to have gotten out. The current problems with ghettos and gangs have been decades in the brewing and can’t be resolved overnight. At the rate the US is going, there is no possiblity that I can see of a resolution to the myriad fundamental governmental policies that initiated these social ills in the first place.

We each of us has a moral (or Christian) obligation to help our neighbor, but government enforcement, taxation and bureaucracy is not the way to do it.

“To the extent that people who are on Section 8 are working, the taxpayers are being asked to subsidize the employers who pay such low wages. It would be better to raise the minimum wage…”

In my understanding, raising minimum wages only contributes to infaltion (which is controlled by the Federal Reserve) — and at the same time lags behind infaltion.

The house I was raised in, a brick three-bedroom one-bath on a half-acre, cost $17,000 in 1960 or so. It never ever increased in size, style or modernity, so why did the price increase to 15 or 20 times its original value in forty years? Why does a 10-cent can of tuna cost $1.39 today?

Why has the cost of education gone up 10 times? And minimum wage has gone up more than 7 times (and again significantly lagging behind inflation)? The simplest answer is government-guaranteed loans and the increased money supply.

The mandated raises in minimum wage is a cause rather than a symptom of the economic problems we all, including the destitute, face.

If I am wrong please correct me, and explain why a family today making $10,000 a year can’t afford a nice house (the median income was $4,080 in 1960).

I’m familiar with some of the phenomena Flicker highlights. The conundrum is, how do we isolate the most incorrigibly violent, while leaving an escape for those who want, in all sincerity, to escape from it, without building up “ghettos” where the violence festers and real potential to do well is crushed?

One possibility is to thin out every demographic, making things sufficiently mixed that there is no cover for the thugs. Another is to plan for a section of town that is the rock-bottom option for those kicked out by strict rules for Section 8 and other subsidized housing… those who work and respect their neighbors get options, those who can’t get the thoroughly isolated New Ghetto, and can work their way to something better.

OR, we can take hands off, let the free market work, and subsidize nothing. We all know that would have some tragic results too.